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Pumpkin Time!
~~Kathryn Jacobs, PowerPointAnswers

With Halloween coming up later this month, I thought it might be fun to step through how to create a single slide presentation with a Halloween theme. Follow along with the following steps to create a fun pumpkin and text slide using autoshapes, text, and the advanced animations available in PPT 2002 and 2003.

If you want to see what my finished presentation looks like, click here to download it.

Step 1: Background

Because this is a Halloween presentation, we want the background to be black. Right click the slide, select Background, and select black as the color. In addition, set the slide layout to the blank slide.

Step 2: Add the text

Add a text box with the words "Happy Halloween". Select the box. First, use Format--> Font to set the color to white, then change the font to something irregular and spooky. I used Tempus Sans ITC, but you can choose anything you want. Change the font size to the largest size that allows the text to stay on one line in a box the width of the slide. In my case, that was 80 point. (Don't know how to get a font size that isn't on the list? Just type the number in the size box. It'll work, trust me.) Drag the text box off the top of the slide. You want it to be at least half its height off the top of the slide.

Add a second text box anywhere in the slide with the word "Boo!" in it. It doesn't matter where you create the box, we'll put it in it's proper place towards the end of the procedure. Make the color and font for this box the same as the previous one, but make the size huge. I used 220 points.

Step 3: Animate the text

Select the Happy Halloween box, right click, and bring up the custom animation pane. We are going to add two motion paths to this element: one to move it on the slide and one to move it to its proper position.

With the text box still selected, click the Add Effect button. Select Motion Paths and slide over to "More Motion Paths". From the list that pops up, select "S Curve 1". This path is about halfway down the left column in the Lines and Curves section. Once it is selected, click OK. This path is an s-curve from right to left. We want to go down instead of across. To change this, click the motion path to select it. A line with a green dot will appear just above the path. Drag the dot so that the path is almost perpendicular to where it started. Now, it is up and down, but the path runs from just above the text to just below it. To move it, click the line representing the path and drag the path down until the top of the path (the green arrow) is just below the words. The bottom of the path (the red arrow) should now be about the middle of the slide. If the path doesn't reach the middle of the slide, stretch it as needed.

We don't want the words in the middle of the screen, since we are going to put something else there. So, add a second s-curve path to the text. This time, turn the path clear upside down. Then, drag it so that the start point is aligned with the end point of the first path. Click the red arrow for the path and drag it down so that it ends about where the second half of the original s-curve was. This sets the second path so that it moves back up just enough to put the text on the slide, but not in the way of the next piece.

These two animations will move the text down and back up the curve as one piece. It would be a better effect, though, to have the letters move one at a time instead of all together. To do this, select both animations in the animation pane and right click them. Select Effect Options. On the first tab of the options, change the "Animate text" value to "By letter" (the last item on the drop down list).

Click off the animations, then back on the first animation. Set the start value to "After Previous" and the speed to "Medium". (You can set the speed either with the Speed drop down box on the task pane or via the timing tab of the animation options.) Select the second animation and make it "With Previous" and medium speed/timing. Right click either animation and select "Show Advanced Timeline". You will see an orange bar next to each of the aniamtions. Click the one for the second animation and drag it to the right until its start point is about the middle of the first animation's orange block.

Set up an exit animation of fade slowly after previous for the Happy Halloween piece. (This is going to be the second to the last animation in the sequence.)

Select the Boo! text box. Add an entrance animation of "Magnify" to this text box. Set it to happen after previous. (This is actually going to be the last animation in the sequence.)

Now is a good time to run a test of your slide. Run the presentation and see if you like how it looks. If you don't like it, tinker with the elements and the animation and re-test. Once you have everything the way you want it, you may want to move the Boo element off the slide so that you have space to work on your pumpkin. If you do move it, be sure to move it back at the end of the slide creation.

Step 4: Create the Pumpkin

Now it is time to create the pumpkin. The pumpkin is created out of a series of moon autoshapes, all nested together. Create one vertical moon shape and change its color to orange. Set the transparency on the shape to 10%. Set the line color to black. Copy the moon shape and paste it back on the slide five times.

Drag each pasted moon shape so that it rests against the the inside of the other. You could leave your pumpkin this way, but you will probably want to adjust it slightly. I found that to make it look most like a half of a pumpkin, I need to adjust the width and height of each slice using the white buttons, the curvature of each slide using the yellow diamond for each, and the angle of some of them by rotating the shape using the green dot.

Once you have what looks like half of a pumpkin with a space in the middle, select all the moon shapes, right click, and select Grouping and slide over to Group. Next, copy and paste the group so that you have two halves. To make the halves face each other, go to the Draw toolbar (at the bottom of your slide) and click "Draw". Drag up to "Rotate or Flip" then over to "Flip Horizontally". Align the two halves so that the bottoms of the innermost moons touch.

Next you need to create the shape that fills the center of the pumpkin. To do that, click on AutoShapes and drag up to "lines" and over. From the list, select the closed curve option. Click at the upper left corner of the open area on your pumpkin. Move your cursor over to the upper right corner and click once. Now, move to the middle of the right side of the open area and click. Continue clicking around the edge of the space. When you get back to the top left corner, double click and the shape should close itself.

Now that you have the basic shape, it is time to edit the points to make it fit the space perfectly. Click the line, then right click and select "Edit Points". Right click again and select "Curve segment". this allows you to add points to the line and curve the line so that it more closely matches the curve of the existing shapes. Once you have the main section of the shape fitting the curves, you need to add one point to the top of the shape and drag it down just a slight amount. (This makes the dip at the top of the pumpkin.) When your shape is the way you want it, set the color, line, and transparency values to match the two sides.

To add a face to your pumpkin, add two tall triangles for eyes, one equilateral triangle for a nose, and a moon (on its side) for a mouth.

To make a stem, select the Arc autoshape. Color it green with no lines and a transparency of 60%. Drag and rotate the arc so that it looks like a pumpkin stem. Send it to the back of the shapes, select the pumpkin pieces, the face pieces, and the stem, and group the entire pumpkin together as one shape. If you want the ribs to stand out more, set the line width to 1.25 instead of the default of .75.

Step 5: Animate the Pumpkin

The animation of the pumpkin is pretty basic. the effects we want are most easily achieved by having three pumpkins, so we are going to animate our existing one, then copy it to make two more.

With the pumpkin selected, bring up the animation task pane. Give the pumpkin an entrance animation of fade and an exit animation of fade. Change the animations to enter After Previous, with a speed of Very Slow. Use the Re-Order buttons at the bottom of the animation task pane to move the animations to just below the second motion path for Happy Halloween.

Select the pumpkin and make two additional copies of it. Set them so that one is just offset to the left of the first one and the other is just offset to the right. Set up their animations so that they appear with the exit of the previous pumpkin and exit after the entrance is done.

Animation Order

When you have finished the animations, the order should be:

1. Downward motion for Happy Halloween (after previous)
2. Upward motion for Happy Halloween (with previous)
3. Entrance for first pumpkin (after previous)
4. Exit for first pumpkin (after previous)
5. Entrance for second pumpkin (with previous)
6. Exit for second pumpkin (after previous)
7. Entrance for third pumpkin (with previous)
8. Exit for third pumpkin (after previous)
9. Exit for Happy Halloween (after previous)
10. Entrance for Boo (after previous)

Step 6: Set up the transition

Since this is a fun presentation, it makes sense to have it end the show automatically. Bring up the transition task pane and select the "Fade Through Black" animation. Set it a speed of slow and to advance automatically after 40 seconds. Apply the transition to all slides.

Step 7: One last object to add....

To make this whole presentation truly a surprise for the person watching, you need to hide your work. Add a rectangle over the slide. Make the rectangle the size of the entire slide. Give it a bright background. Add text that says "Click to Start". Set the text to the same font you used for the other text and make it as big as you can.

Give this box an exit animation of Fade, with a speed of Very Fast. Set it to start On Click, then move it to the top of your animation list.

All done!

Save your presentation (if you haven't already) and run it to test it out. You may find that you want to tinker with the timing, the animations, etc., but it should work fairly well the first time.

Kathryn Jacobs, Microsoft MVP, PowerPoint and OneNote
Get PowerPoint answers at http://www.powerpointanswers.com

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Kathy is a trainer, writer, Girl Scout, parent, and whatever else there is time for.

I believe life is meant to be lived. But, if we live without making a difference, it makes no difference that we lived.